


Into the Tunnel Fractal

by Domimagetrix



Series: Razwan Bahir, World Guardian [5]
Category: Runescape (Video Games)
Genre: Adult Language, Blood and Injury, F/F, Horrifying Death of One (1) Chinchompa, Mild Reference to Adult Themes, Nepotism, Seasickness, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Vomiting, alcohol mention, headcanons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-16
Updated: 2019-01-16
Packaged: 2019-10-10 22:21:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17434589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Domimagetrix/pseuds/Domimagetrix
Summary: A few glimpses into Razwan's early life.





	Into the Tunnel Fractal

_I'm waking up, lost in boxes outside Tesco_  
_Look like a bum sipping codeine Coca-Cola_  
_Thought that I was northern Camden's own Flash Gordon_ _  
Sonic raygun, gonna be a superstar_

Glass Animals - “Life Itself”

 

……….

 

Prologue:

 

Fads burst into existence and flee just as quickly in Pollnivneach as they do anywhere else. Most have but one life, a brilliant life where a phrase, a fashion statement, a toy, or an idea consumes people - most often the young, though by no means are older adults immune - and with it comes the drive to reaffirm social connections. Friends who’d begun paring off in different life directions reconvene and relive the heydays of their old community. The fad is introduced, spreads, and is reinvented myriad times between these old friends.

Then, spent of its power, the focus of the fad disappears quietly or enjoys a brief undeath as the subject of scorn.

One such a surge of fashionable interest recurs almost yearly, usually around Nowruz, in the form of kaleidoscopes.

Like many fad items, they come in varieties, from intricate cylinders with well-positioned mirrors crafted expressly for the purpose, featuring gemstones and other translucent, vividly-colored items, to cheap tubes filled with broken glass and beads. The former offer rich, moving murals to the curious eye which peers into the flat glass at the bottom, the latter often dismally-lit hints of color spread too broadly to be genuinely interesting.

That is, if the beads don’t get stuck. In those cases, the defunct kaleidoscope’s peering end is dipped into water and ground charcoal and used by the prank-minded on those they know rarely think of such things.

One year, when Razwan was eleven, her older brother Kierhan bought her a quality kaleidoscope at not-inconsiderable expense. Though tempted given her recent behavior, he decided against charcoaling the peering side and left the toy to be experienced without tarnish.

Over the course of the average human lifetime, a person feels anywhere from a handful to many epiphanies. Beautiful vistas seen in their breathtaking entirety, love shared between people in a generous and selfless way, or inspiring bravery witnessed, but the instances are typically multiple for your everyday human being. Not all are uplifting, either; some find disquieting truth in a pit of muck, a hollow chasm that extends downward and seemingly into infinity, or the handiwork of cruelty and war.

During all her too-many-for-a-mortal-human years, Razwan has known only two such experiences.

Once during her first visit to Sliske’s soul.

The other at the age of eleven, when she first peered into a well-made kaleidoscope, watched the endless arrangements of light and color shift without predictability or the ability to capture in stillness, and forever marked the experience.

That afternoon was spent half-turned toward the sun, slowly revolving the tube and marvelling at the gently shifting shards of luminous color.

That night was spent with her hands caked in clay, painstakingly crafting her first Zamorakian pendant.

 

………..

 

 _What you deserve is what you get_ _  
_ _You wanna know now, but you don’t know it yet_

Seeed - “What You Deserve is What You Get”

 

  
  
I found her in the north of Pollnivneach’s market square. She stood in the sun, gnarled hands wrapped around the top of her cane, pouring godly effort into a serene, bland smile that left little doubt in my mind.

“RHYAZ!”  
  
My aunt peered at me through the careless arrangement of dreadlocks with large, impish brown eyes. There wasn’t a hint of shame or remorse in them, only a half-squint in deference to the light’s angle.

I inhaled to continue yelling when a pair of hands grabbed my boot.

Ihali, kebab stall abandoned in favor of lying on his side on the sandstone, spoke softly - and with an intimate tone I didn’t really care for - to the worn leather.

_“You’re the only one who really appreciates my hot sauce.”_

Extracting my boot from his grasp and taking care not to step on the limp noodle of restaurant owner, I pinned my aunt with the sternest gaze I could manage. “What did you do?”

Her tiny hand went to her chest, eyes wide with feigned innocence. “Me? I didn’t do anything. Saiman poured the potion into the well; I just cooked it up. Something to amuse the barkeep long enough for me to edit my tab.” She lifted a hand and waved it in airy dismissal. “The boy must’ve confused the well with the bar’s water source.”

One of my cousins weaved and stumbled on the other side of the pavilion, snatching at something in the air only he could see and muttering angrily to himself. “Come back here! _I need to spend you!”_

Rhyaz and I turned to watch his progress with interest before I looked back at her, voice toneless with wonder and horror. “You’ve drugged them all. They’re fucking hallucinating. You’ve drugged the entire town of Pollnivneach.”

She shrugged, grinning. “Relax, dear. They’re all used to being drunk. I’d be a pretty poor witch if I couldn’t manage a bit of a wilder brew.”

I rubbed my face and tried not to scream.

One preparatory inhale later saw my hands falling back to my sides, but something moved in my peripheral vision and I looked away from my aunt.

The space between the far stalls and one of several commerce buildings sat steeped in shadow. Something in that space had moved, and my eyes roved over the spot, seeking, willing it to happen again.

Nothing.

“You alright, dear?”

 _Dear_ sparked an odd lurch in my stomach, but the feeling went ignored and I turned back to Rhyaz. “Can you fix them? Before someone goes headfirst into a well or someone’s kid tumbles down an embankment and breaks a leg?”

“You really haven’t done much living if you know so little about mild hallucinations.” She lifted one thin shoulder in a shrug. “I’ll pour in the antidote if you insist.”

“What the hell does that mean, ‘I haven’t done much living?’”

Her smile became a dare. “I stand by it. You couldn’t handle a good time.”

We stood there, eyeing each other. She drew a vile-looking little green bottle from her pocket and began working the stopper free.

I held up my hand. “Wait.”

Rhyaz paused, both eyebrows raised in disingenuous blandness.

I turned, sidestepping Ihali, and reached into the well in question. Pulling the bucket up by its rope and dipping my waterskin into it, I let a fair amount of earth-cooled, witch-tampered water into the bag before allowing the bucket slide back down.

I turned back, meeting Rhyaz’s approving smile. I hefted the bag in salute.

And drank.

 

…………

 

 _No chariots of fire come to take me home_ _  
_ _I’m lost in the woods, and I wander alone (hey-hey)_

Barns Courtney - “Hellfire”

 

“You’ll do.”

Guthix spoke, and the world boiled down to green and pain.

I collapsed, screaming shrilly enough to make my own ears whine in sympathy, and a slow electricity drew serrated claws over unprepared nerves. It seared and ruined, overtaking every other sense without mercy.

The pain wasn’t part of me. I _was_ pain. Not a living thing but agony’s receptacle, overtaxed and overfilled. There wasn’t enough of me to hold it all and it didn’t matter. The grass and moss-covered stone underneath me didn’t matter. I screwed my eyes shut against it and yet I saw nothing else.

Green, bright green, all-consuming. It ate into me and I railed in body, voice, and mind against it.

I didn’t know how long it went on. A moment or a year, I couldn’t have said.

It didn’t matter.

It didn’t matter when it began to subside.

When some decision in my mind _ticked_ in confirmation with an impossibly mundane headache for accompaniment.

The pain diminished enough for me to see, and to feel the ground beneath me. With awkward, weak, shuddery effort I shifted and planted my palms in the moss, fighting the shock and the odd, stilted pain in my chest enough to stand.

I nearly stumbled when I reached down for the Staff of Armadyl, but a lucky foot planted in front of me kept me upright.

I held it in my hands. The world tried to spin and I refused it, willpower and need overcoming the draw of unconsciousness by a sliver of nose over the finish line. My grip tightened, knuckles going white, but the change in pressure barely registered.

The thing felt heavy. So, too, did my head, but it wasn’t enough to prevent me dragging my gaze from the slightly pitted length of the staff upward.

Guthix’s face, tired, returned my stare. He seemed ancient and withered just then, lacking in something vital since he’d spoken those two words and sentenced me to a torture whose time parameters I still couldn’t define. As though he’d suffered, too.

Sliske was in my peripheral vision, but it didn’t matter. I saw Guthix, only Guthix.

_I hate you._

It was soft in my mind’s voice. Almost conversational.

I burned. I raged. There was a bottomless pit of chagrin in his stare and I hated that, too.

I stepped forward.

_Die._

Another step and I lost my footing, muted impact on my right changing my trajectory. The one who’d barrelled into me snatched the staff away, and my traitor’s fingers offered only token resistance.

_No, no fuck you don’t you save him. I will kill him. I will come back and kill him if I have to. He dies. I will fucking kill him don’t you understand what he did give it BACK-_

I barely felt the impact of the ground. It’d been too much to ask in the wake of what Guthix had done. I was spent, shivering, what little I had left in me devoted to seeking out the interloper who’d derailed my revenge.

Those robes again, the voice, then Guthix’s voice.

Sliske had saved Guthix.

I opened my mouth to yell, but nothing came of it. I hadn’t taken a full breath since blinding green had sapped me of senses and energy. It did little now that I could, throat too abraded to object beyond dry, angry hissing. There was nothing for it but to take in air and yell at both of them in my head.

_I spit on your shadow, Sliske, you bitch, you motherfucker-_

Pain and exhaustion blurred my vision, but not enough to mistake the vague shape moving farther up the slope than was necessary for conversation.

Farther.

Despite so recently proving it pointless, I inhaled to yell.

The shape went airborne.

_No!_

My eyes squeezed shut before I could decide whether or not to watch. I knew. I knew when the deep, resonant voice of balance’s god choked on something liquid. I knew when Sliske’s voice lost all its polished affectation in a grunt-turned-growl. When a tectonic-sized sound issued from somewhere beyond the outcropping of rock.

_Oh you bitch how dare you take this from me you Duzakh-spawned shitheap BITCH-_

So weary. I was so anima-damned weary.

Angry voices blended in verbal chunks with placating voices. My stomach rolled and my eyes refused to stay open. I lay there, drifting in fresh, empty misery. Every so often, a word would slip through incomprehensibility and into the defined. _Guthix. Sliske. Dead. World Guardian._

Other voices receded.

Something new intruded on the promise of silence.

_Footsteps. I know what footsteps are. Okay. I’m going to be okay. Just lift my head._

Too much. I tried again.

_Eyes. Open those._

I wept in bitterness, whimpering, but opened my eyes. The hem of a different robe, this one largely white with blue trim that kept twisting into scrawling ghost-letters with more tears, obscured the moss and grass that should’ve greeted me.

“It looks like I owe you a debt of gratitude.”

Beautiful voice. Confidence in it, and a kind of magnanimity I’d heard in the voices of rulers secure in the notion that all was right in the world so long as they held its reins. A kingly voice. A godly voice.

War was waged between my will and recalcitrant arms. A hand - coated in what I assumed was a thin blue glove - was washed into my field of vision on a fresh wave of angry tears. I wedged an elbow into the moss underneath myself and wormed upward, hissing at the proffered hand.

It retreated, its owner offering me a kingly - if disappointed - sigh. “As you wish.”

War didn’t relent, but my drive stole a small victory in getting me on all fours, then sitting on my feet with one hand panic-grasping my own thigh to keep myself vaguely upright. Muscles in my midsection kept fluttering with the threat of giving out, but they were threats only. I blinked moisture out of my eyes and looked up.

_Not a glove. He’s... painted? Who paints themselves blue? And THAT blue?_

The white-bearded face nodded down at me. “My name is Saradomin.” He looked around beyond me then back, lifting a hand. “You and I should speak elsewhere.”

Magic moved around me, and gravity swayed. Light began to surround me.

And stopped, disappearing, a new wave of nausea its parting gift. I looked down. The robe’s hem had moved just enough to reveal the forward halves of a pair of shoes.

_Do that again, and I’ll smear you on the rock like a dwellberry._

His voice was grim. “It seems Guthix has rendered you immune to my power. I will take my leave for now, but you should come see me when-”

I opened my mouth to introduce myself.

I vomited on Saradomin’s shoes.

_Welcome back, asshole. Strength through chaos._

 

………..

 

 _Hey, alles glänzt, so schön neu_  
_Hey, wenn's dir nicht gefällt, mach neu (whoo)_  
_Die Welt mit Staub bedeckt, doch ich will sehn wo's hingeht_  
_Steig auf den Berg aus Dreck, weil oben frischer Wind weht_ _  
Hey, alles glänzt, so schön neu_

Peter Fox - “Alles neu”

 

Ranni dipped a hand below the counter and pawed blindly around for a pen, finding one and lifting it for inspection. Its ink reservoir was low, but it’d do for the rest of the inventory sign-off sheets requiring her signature. Business at the Grand Exchange had been lively since before sunrise in tandem with a sharp upturn in warbands activity up north, only now beginning to taper off. She looked forward to the end of her shift - and a quiet bottle of fireside whiskey - with an avidity bordering on the religious.

Vigorous squeaking and the thin, tinny sound of rattled cages issued from behind her. She heard the shift manager curse.

“Sixty. Sixty red chinchompas. Take four times their space in the pocket vault just to keep them from doing that damned thing they do.”

She sighed. “Just talk to them. I told you. Use your _nice_ customer voice.”

“My half of the floor is coated in pellets and they _stink,_ Ranni. Can’t you just _damn it don’t you fucking do it don’t you-”_

_-POP-_

Ranni squeezed her eyes shut. _Saradomin’s left nut, you’re useless._

_“RANNI HELP ME!”_

_I hope someone hoofs your dad in the jewels for arranging shit with Commerce and shoving you into this job. You signing my paycheck is why I drink._ “Stop. Just… stop. Before you set them all off and we have to reimburse the client for the rest.” Ranni scooped her sheets and pen back under the desk and trotted over to Roman’s side of the counter.

An hour passed as they moved chinchompas gingerly from the bank floor to the pocket vault, spacing their cages widely. Too close together risked agitating them, and agitation risked their volatile defense mechanisms activating, the rapid vibration that killed them, rapidly dehydrated them, and caused the almost mummified remains to explode in a wash of excited air molecules and crimson dust.

Why people _wanted_ the little monsters was beyond Ranni’s understanding. They bred in litters of a hundred, ate and shat at breathtaking speed, and their volatility was risked with the slightest emotional upset. They didn’t even leave anything useful behind, just dust and a small puddle of water.

Another twenty minutes for cleanup saw them filing away the last of the paperwork and closing up shop. Locks were set, ward prints activated, chinchompa pellets swept. Roman complained about the smell, Varrock on the whole, and muttered something about getting his uncle to find another position for him, and Ranni ignored all save the last, silently hoping he’d follow through.

In truth, Ranni loved Varrock. She loved its clustered buildings, the way everything looked wrought stone by stone to accommodate people. A brute fist of development had landed here, then pinched, smoothed, and prodded everything according to a design. No wrangling overgrowth every two days. The only bugs here were tiny, and absent when the cold months hit true. No land spirits fussing over minute territorial disputes. It was tidy, and she found a grand measure of solace in tidy.

She pressed ink out of the pen in a final signature and shelved the pile.

“I want to open an account.”

Ranni looked across the desk and felt the past hit like a tidal wave.

_“You have to tell dad. If you don’t, I will.”_

_“We’ll never want for money again, Ranni. It’s important for us and important you never tell.”_

_“Dad’ll just pull you out and have you hacking brush until you’re thirty.”_

_“Maybe, but if we’re quiet, I’ll be too old for him to by the time he finds out. I’m almost sixteen; that’s close enough.”_

_“I don’t want you to die. Please? Can’t you do something else? Mahogany logs, the traders like those-”_

_“-I’m not going to be some lumberjack’s tour guide working for tips and starving through slow seasons. Hawan means money, Ranni,_ real _money.”_

_“People die, Wenu! You’ll die and leave me alone.”_

_“I won’t die. I’m a mage.”_

_“That doesn’t mean anything and you know it. You’re not the only mage in the world. I saw the bullmen when dad and I went to the herbalist’s. Right outside. Bullmen are from somewhere else. Like… somewhere-else-somewhere-else.”_

_“Just long enough to get some money so we can move, Ranni, I promise.”_

_“...”_

_“A year. Maybe two. Then we can leave.”_

_“...better take that patch off your arm, then. Dad’ll know it’s from Hawan.”_

Ranni looked at the wraparound patch on the girl’s arm, then back at her face. Despite the lack of softness on her frame, she didn’t look much over fourteen. The sleeveless shirt left sinewy-looking muscle bare, alongside horizontal blade wounds and layered bruises. It looked like someone had been using her little arms for cutting boards. A couple of the lines looked new, one having drizzled blood slowly before clotting, leaving red-black trails that’d only begun flaking away.

Angry black eyes met Ranni’s. Determined.

She heard Roman step up behind her. “We’re closed, and the age requirement-”

Ranni took a guess as to where Roman’s foot was behind her and stomped, satisfied when her effort netted an indignant squawk. She spoke over him. “I think this nice young _adult_ woman would like to open an account with us.”

Roman inhaled, and Ranni held up a finger in his direction. He went quiet.

Withdrawing the forms from below the desk, she indicated where to fill out name and information, then tapped in various places where signature was required. When the girl was done, Ranni herself signed on the teller’s line.

The girl passed her a sack of coins. Ranni worried the drawstring open and counted.

_Hundreds. Hundreds here._

More. It’d been heavy, but Ranni had handled too many coin-weighted pouches to misjudge by that much.

_Almost two thousand here. Wenu was bringing home twenty or thirty at a time when he started._

Ranni filled out the sheet, said aloud the amount, and the girl nodded solemnly, strands of black hair that’d worked free of her braid sifting with the movement.

Dates and dots were filled, and Ranni couldn’t help but ask. “Saving for the future?”

The girl - Bahir, according to the sheet - offered a sickle grin at Ranni. “Nah, I’m never touching this again. Just want it out of Godblessed’s fucking hands.”

Silence. Roman took bag and papers without a word and disappeared. From behind her, Ranni heard the sounds of wards and locks being undone.

Ranni looked down at the patch again. She knew it’d be an obvious stare, but couldn’t help herself.

Bahir looked down, too, then tugged at the patch wrap until she’d wormed it off her arm. “Guess this can go, too.”

The girl handed Ranni the patch, then turned away, walking vaguely west toward one of the open exits of the Grand Exchange. Ranni looked at it, turning the piece of fabric in a slow, methodical finger-walk. Something dark stained both sides.

Blood. And a little of that blood had been used to inscribe a small image on the inside, where it had rested against the girl’s arm.

A tiny face.

 _Not quite._ Ranni looked closer. _A mask?_

It grinned at her.

Ranni clutched the bloodstained patch in her hand, and thought of her brother.

 

………

 

 _“A sailor, a kinsman true,_  
_To my aye and honor a name!_  
_Brothers at home and in crew;_  
_Aye-and-aye, our foes are t’same!”_  
  
Weatherbeaten boots clumped on the deck as Fremennik went about the business of singing and running the ship. I clung to the railing with mittened hands, trying and failing to keep my insides from swinging counterpoint with the boat’s swaying.

“Move t’that last one! Grab and haul ‘er down, aye?”

_“Aye!”_

_“Heave!”_

_Stop. Don’t want to._

_“HEAVE!”_

_Fuck’s sake shut up, you can pull that without-_

_“HEAVE!”_

They heaved, the boat heaved.

_“HEAVE!”_

I heaved.

Water and wood both made churning sounds enough to cover the noise of me offering breakfast to the sea, but just barely. Fish and eggs had been a strange start to the day, and the return trip did little for already conflicting flavors.

_“Just a trip up north and back,” she says. “You’ll have fun, Razwan!” she says. “You’ll learn something,” she says. Already know how to vomit, Astrid, fuck’s sake._

The nip of rum at breakfast probably hadn’t helped, but I wasn’t about to claim fault.

_I hate this shit._

It was cold. Not desert-cold but icy, the kind of frigid misery that worked its way into fingerbones and outer arcs of the ears. Wind kept condensing that cold into a wet sheet snapping at every exposed inch, sometimes muted only in part by the fur-lined coat, mittens, pants, and boots I’d crafted under Astrid’s tutelary eye. She’d smiled at my progress, but the smile had become a thin-lipped expression with hands pressed together in front of her chin when she’d seen what I’d done with the fur scraps and leftover sinew.

_Which you were fine with later, weren’t you? Not that it was good for long, since you can’t go anywhere for long in just a fur bikini in this part of the world, but you didn’t complain then. We’re getting married, and so help me I will bundle you into a carpet and carry you someplace warm for the honeymoon. Bikinis, coconuts, boats that stay nice and even and don’t HEAVE-_

I slid down to an ungainly heap on the deck and gripped the railing post, moaning.

Someone slid less gracelessly down next to me with a happy thump. A waterskin held in a large, meaty hand found its way into my field of view. “Drink.”

Keeping one arm curled around the post, I twisted off the top and took a wary sip. It was cool, minty, slightly sweet, and my stomach ignored the next cheery cry of _“HEAVE!”_ from the deck above.

I passed it back with its top loose, looking at my new companion. “Thanks.”

His copper-blonde moustache moved in a smile. “No problem. My little one’s like that; put him on a boat and he feeds the fishes quicker’n anything.” He patted my back and I was almost catapulted face-first to the floor. “Better?”

“Uh… aye.”

He laughed at that. “Easy does it. By the time we head back, you’ll have yer legs on.”

I offered him a weak smile. “Hope so.”

“Aye, I know it. Just try to get a feel for the rocking and stay off the rum-”

“Oi, Birger, got a haunt belowdecks!”

My companion looked over at the head poking out of the hatch to the hold. “Ain’t a haunt but yer damned farts, boy!”

The boy in question shook his head. “Saw somethin’ in the shadows behind the barrels. Come look for yerself!”

The giant hand clapped my back and Birger stood. “Back in a second. He’ll not stop until I’ve checked his closet and under his bed, too, aye.”

I nodded.

Minutes later, both reemerged from the hold, Birger looking satisfied while the younger man muttered, perplexed and irritated.

“Told ye.”

“I’m tellin’ _ye,_ wasn’t a damned weight-shift. There was somethin’ back there!”

“Swingin’ rope, then. Get yer head outta yer arse.”

“It _wasn’t-”_

Morning gave way to afternoon, Birger checking on me now and again. By evening, I was walking around the ship, mostly steadily, and by and large without contributing anything to the water around us. I even managed something of the food offered in their mess, sitting with Birger and a handful of others as they told stories over ale.

War stories, mostly, hunting or doing battle with a fearsome something-or-other with “-rir” at the end of its name. The details bore signs of exaggeration, but it seemed to matter not at all, or to be something expected of the one doing the dinner table entertaining.

By night, I was bundled in a heap of furs on some kind of hanging net of a bed, a handful of other similarly sleepy lumps piled atop more hanging nets. Not precisely blissful, but almost comfortable.

I dozed.

And dreamed.

 

…………

 

_It turns in her hands, turns again._

_Colors. Patterns, but never the same one twice._

_Just beauty that cannot be held forever, beauty taken in only in passing, never to be seen again. Beauty in motion, never static. Hold still and the wonder fades immediately._

_Just colors in a moderately interesting arrangement._

_Turn, turn. Her careful fingers revolve the tube between them after a pause._

_And now it’s beauty again._


End file.
